Ally McCoist : The Rebuilding Starts

[djbroxybear 0]

AS Rangers have stumbled towards the Irn-Bru Third Division title in the last few weeks, manager Ally McCoist has appealed for time to strengthen his threadbare squad.

 

"We just have to get over the line," he stressed after his much-depleted team had slumped to a 0-0 draw with Stirling Albion at Ibrox last weekend.

 

"Once we have done that, we will have to put together a team again which will win the next title. We are in desperate

need of bodies."

 

Having had just a matter of weeks to build a side for the 2012/13 campaign, it is understandable that he is counting the days until the summer.

 

McCoist had no option but to go with the youth players and smattering of senior professionals who remained in Glasgow last year after their financial difficulties.

 

On top of that, he brought in four of the free agents – Ian Black, Kevin Kyle, Frandcisco Sandaza and Dean Shiels – who

were available in Scotland at that time.

 

No member of that quartet, though, has excelled consistently in the last eight months in any of the competitions Rangers have been involved in.

 

The foreign imports who arrived, Anestis Argyriou, Emilson Cribari, Sebastien Faure and Francesco Stella, were hardly household names either.

 

It is not going too far to suggest that David Templeton, signed from Hearts on the final day of the transfer business, was the only significant bit of business the manager carried out.

 

Even the acquisition of the winger, though, was tinged with bitter disappointment. McCoist had wanted to get six players in. He managed to get just one.

 

He failed in his attempt to land Australian international Ryan McGowan. In addition, he lost captain Carlos Bocanegra to Racing Santander in Spain for a year on loan.

 

With Black, Kyle, Andy Little, Lewis Macleod, Ross Perry, Sandaza, Shiels and Templeton all missing in recent weeks, Gers have toiled badly home and away.

 

So, no matter who comes and goes in the close season – and there will be a few outgoing as well as incoming – the chances are high there will be a stark improvement in standards next term.

 

The Rangers manager, aided and abetted by his chief scout and former team-mate Neil Murray, has spent several months scouring the country and the continent and identifying potential targets.

 

The Glasgow club is, of course, prohibited from paying money for players until January 2014 due to a punishment imposed by the SFA for non-payment of millions of pounds of taxes during the Craig Whyte regime.

 

They are, though, able to bring in players who are out of contract on September 1 and it is their intention to do so.

Cammy Bell (Kilmarnock), Andre Bikey (Middlesbrough), Jon Daly (Dundee United) and Motherwell's Nicky Law are

among those being tracked.

 

However, to what extent will bringing in free agents actually improve Rangers for the next campaign?

They will certainly be better than they have been in recent weeks. Having lost to part-time Annan at home, and deservedly so, it would be hard to be any worse.

 

But will they able to challenge in the Scottish Communities League Cup and the William Hill Scottish Cup, as many of their fans will expect them to?

 

Will they even be able to compete for promotion to the top flight if a move to a 12-12-18 set-up gets the go-ahead and they are fast-tracked into the second tier? It is debatable.

 

The Ibrox club tried to go down the route of bringing in Bosman transfers before. The results were disastrous.

In 2005, when they started to experience the off-field difficulties that came to a head last year, they attempted to bolster their pool on the cheap. The likes of Olivier Bernard and José-Karl Pierre-Fanfan failed spectacularly.

 

After Paul Le Guen took over in 2006 he brought in Lionel Letizi, Makhtar N'Diaye, Antoine Ponroy, Libor Sionko and William Stanger for free. He lasted until January.

 

The club was admittedly playing at a different level – in the SPL and in Europe – at that time. And there were several exceptions who flourished.

 

Jean-Alain Boumsong, Brahim Hemdani, Dado Prso and Alex Rae, to name just four, cost not a single penny. They made a tidy £8million profit on the Frenchman, who played less than 20 first-team games, and got many years of sterling service from the others.

 

But the fact remains that securing the services of a top player on a free transfer these days, despite the financial climate, is a huge accomplishment.

 

McCoist, too, has admitted publicly of the difficulty he has in persuading potential signings to drop down the divisions.

"It's far from an ideal situation," he confessed. "I've spoken to a number of players who have been put off due to the overall situation.

 

"The only way I can sell it to players is the size of the club and the fans. There are a lot of negatives, but I can use the training facilities and the fact we're getting 47,000 at Ibrox every second week."

 

The wages Rangers can pay will also go a long way towards luring reinforcements. But their supporters should not expect an overnight transformation.

 

Only when McCoist gets to dip into the £10m which has been earmarked for new players will Rangers return to anywhere near the levels they once scaled.

Edited March 28, 2013 by djbroxybear

[Darthter 542]

Maybe I've got got some negative goggles on....but again, no the most encouraging statement from the Rangers Management team.

 

In a nutshell, out squad are crap & you can't expect good performances from them - this includes the SPL "Stars" that were brought in. They are only getting a game because we have no choice (which unfortunately has a great deal of truth too it...)

 

He is openly stating that a number of the current squad will be getting shipped out & replaced.

 

May just be me, but that ain't gonna encourage the team to play better. It may induce a feeling of "if I'm getting punted, I don't want to pick up an injury"......

 

Also, the carrot of bringing in a load of new players & the performances being better - he has done NOTHING positive with the group of players he has.

 

He also states that luring decent players to the club is a problem (no arguments there - general league status etc), but goes on to say that the wages they can pay go a long way to bringing them in.....my reading of that is we will offer free agents a substantial wad of cash to play for us - similar to Sandaza probably. The risk there being "what if they turn out to be duds???"

 

Nothing in there to full fans with any real confidence IMHO....

[djbroxybear 0]

The above statements are worrying, Ally can't build / mould a team together so we will go out and buy a new team to win Div 2 pay 4-7k a week for out of contract SPL players to win Div 2, we should be getting the best crop of SFL players for peanuts and make something of them and sell them on for future profit.

 

QOS have a 23 man squad and won Div 2 with ease no SPL players and paying thousands of pounds in wages, its the way to do it.

[Cotter 0]

These are re-hashed quotes from a while ago. Nothing new here, pish journalism as per.

[djbroxybear 0]

These are re-hashed quotes from a while ago. Nothing new here, pish journalism as per.

 

 

 

 

From todays evening times Matthew Lindsay.......Yeah really bad journalism

[GovanAllan 0]

It's like a greatest hits of Ally's most cringeworthy one liners.

 

He will get 10mill to spend as well its bloody terrifying .

[djbroxybear 0]

The worry is, if we knew last summer was to be a short term fix, then why the hell did we hand out 4 and 5 year deals to Cribari, Faure, Shiels, Black etc? If we didn't expect them to be with us in the SPL, then why didn't we just save our money (signing fees, wages and pay offs) for this summer's real rebuilding? Were we really that scared that our own kids, alongside Little, Templeton, Wallace, Hutton, Little, Perry, Jig and Alexander couldn't win SFL3? If so, that is more frightening and says more than anything else.

[GovanAllan 0]

The worry is, if we knew last summer was to be a short term fix, then why the hell did we hand out 4 and 5 year deals to Cribari, Faure, Shiels, Black etc? If we didn't expect them to be with us in the SPL, then why didn't we just save our money (signing fees, wages and pay offs) for this summer's real rebuilding? Were we really that scared that our own kids, alongside Little, Templeton, Wallace, Hutton, Little, Perry, Jig and Alexander couldn't win SFL3? If so, that is more frightening and says more than anything else.

 

Great question maybe someone will have the baws to ask him sometime soon.

[the gunslinger 3,366]

so he needs to spend money to beat postmen playing well.

[amms 0]

This is like the Durrant thread, read what McCoist actually said before lambasting him - "It's far from an ideal situation," he confessed. "I've spoken to a number of players who have been put off due to the overall situation. "The only way I can sell it to players is the size of the club and the fans. There are a lot of negatives, but I can use the training facilities and the fact we're getting 47,000 at Ibrox every second week."

 

That's it, that's the only quote in the entire piece. It's also clearly the answer to a question, yet we don't get to read what the actual question was. Cotter is dead right, this is pure speculation on the part of a journalist who has got to fill a space in his paper with a story on Rangers. This article tells us nothing.